


We Teach Ourselves To Walk

by heyhester



Series: Something of Life [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Found Families, Gen, these two are everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 09:05:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12678744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyhester/pseuds/heyhester
Summary: They don’t quite have a conversation as much as he just opens up the passenger door to the Blazer and she clambers in, matter of factly. She shivers in the front seat for a few minutes before he takes her hands and puts them on the vents, watches her close her eyes and let out a bone deep sigh of relief as the heat hits her fingers.Okay Hopper, he thinks to himself.Don’t fuck this up.





	We Teach Ourselves To Walk

it’s a cold day in the woods in early January when all of a sudden she’s there behind him, filthy and freezing and wearing a checkered deerstalker hat like the one his grandfather used to have. It’s a bit surreal - somehow he thought it would be harder than her just appearing in front of him, but hey - who’s he to complain about catching a break? They don’t quite have a conversation as much as he just opens up the passenger door to the Blazer and she clambers in, matter of factly. She shivers in the front seat for a few minutes before he takes her hands and puts them on the vents, watches her close her eyes and let out a bone deep sigh of relief as the heat hits her fingers.

 _Okay Hopper_ , he thinks to himself. _Don’t fuck this up._

*************

She’s really - she’s a study in contradictions if he ever saw one. She’s quiet, but she’s not shy. She’s not antagonistic or angry, but she’s not really friendly, either. He’s never actually seen her laugh. Sometimes he gets the impression that she’s completely bored and unimpressed by him and would really rather be alone, and other times she hovers near him like she doesn’t want him to even be out of her sight. She’s totally impartial on certain things, like - she never cares what kind of music he puts on and apparently she could literally not give a shit about the clothing selection she has. Other things though, she’s aggressively opinionated on. What her favourite desserts are, or what’s on tv. The disappointment is ridiculously palpable if he brings home snacks she doesn’t like, or if a soap opera she’s waiting for plays a rerun.

In the beginning she explores the cabin like it’s a new world, treating objects he wouldn’t think twice about with fascination. She likes textured things, rough things - the covers of old books, scratchy afghan blankets, the whirls and knots in the wood of the coffee table that probably needed a new coat of varnish a decade ago. The way an old mirror reflects spotty afternoon light, the sticky feeling of skin on hot vinyl chairs, the smell of bacon and eggs cooking in the morning - every one of these is a new experience for her, a small step into a wider world.

She’s almost completely ignorant of societal norms and modern conveniences. The kitchen is a place of utter mystery. She watches him with fascination the first few times he uses the cheese grater or the stove top or a myriad other appliances. He has to keep nudging her out of the way, she stands so close. He has stern conversations with her about not letting anyone in the house without the special knock, fire safety, and why she can’t drink his ‘brown juice’ in the fridge. He thinks her eyes will pop out of her head the first time she sees the elk heads and fish bodies on their plaques on the walls. She has no idea what to do with a broom the first time he puts it in front of her, and she has a bad reaction to the smell of bleach when he brings in cleaning supplies one day.

He sometimes sees her watching the television and mimicking phrases, actions. A man kissing his lovers hand on ‘The Young and the Restless’ has her enraptured for ages. He catches her once, through the doorway into her room, extending her own hand out to an imaginary boy, as if waiting for her own kiss.

**********

In the summer, when it gets so hot in the cabin it would literally be cruel and unusual punishment to keep her inside, they both spend time in a carefully cordoned off small area outdoors. As much as she must have hated being in that lab, she doesn’t really like it outside. Obviously she spent a significant amount of time in the woods trying desperately to survive in harsh conditions by any means necessary, and it’s sort of destroyed that natural wonder kids have of big trees and birds nests and animal tracks. Her instinct is to see nature as either something she can use or something she needs to be afraid of, and that really fucking rankles Jim. He might have had a shit life as an adult but his childhood was pretty fucking great, in large part because of the time he and his dad and his granddad spent outside, hunting and fishing and swimming and hiking. Sara loved being outside. She loved animals and she loved playing in leaves, she loved her big pink winter coat and making snow angels. Eleven sits quietly next to him as he brings over a fallen birds nest, still one cracked open egg inside of it. He explains - the mother bird laid the eggs, and sat on them until they hatched. Her babies had then flown off and left the nest to make their own. She doesn’t say anything, a sort of expectant expression on her face, like, _‘yes, and?’_ And he feels a pang of something - disappointment, maybe - In himself for obviously not being able to peak her interest and disappointment that the circumstances of her life have made it so hard for her to find joy in something like this. Truthfully he’s not even sure she really understands what he’s told her about birds and hatching eggs, but before he can ask, his radio goes off. They trundle back inside and Jim forgets about the conversation until a few days later, when he spots the cracked egg shell sitting, daintily, on the table next to her bed.

********

Generally he calls her ‘Kid’. There’s a fondness to it, something simultaneously casual and comfortable. She doesn’t have a problem with it; in fact he’s used to that little half smile she gives him when he calls out to her: “Kid, you’re gonna go blind sitting that close to the box, move the couch back where it was,” or “Hey Kid, c’mere - got a surprise for you,” when he brings home really good junk food or something new for her to see, a new book or a new movie, or something neat from the station she can fiddle with.

Her real name is Jane but it doesn’t fit; it’s too close in his mind to ‘Jane Doe’, a sort of stand in for something real. She had obviously gone by ‘eleven’ in the lab but he refuses to call her that. Mike Wheeler and his friends called her ‘El,’ and that seems a little more normal. He tends to use El when he’s aggravated or frustrated- “El, will you quit messing with the television and sit here and eat?” or “El, no one solves a rubik’s cube so stop moping about it”.

Sometimes, when he’s tired and not watching himself, he calls her Ellie. It rolls off the tongue so easy and he knows he’s let it slip a time or two. One night, at the cabin on a bad day and with a little too much drink in him, he falls asleep on the couch. She wakes him up by silently moving his legs up off the floor onto the cushions, dragging an old afghan over top of him. “Thanks, Ellie,” he’d slurred out, not thinking about it. He hadn’t caught her reaction and she’s never brought it up, but it scares him every time he does it. It feels so shockingly intimate, so achingly familiar; something a real father would call his real daughter. But he’s not her father and she’s not his daughter - most of the time he doesn’t even really know what they are to each other. So for the most part, ‘Kid’ is what he sticks with.

**********

She trusts him, he can see that. He knows she understands that he’s not going to hurt her, but the hard part is making her understand that not hurting someone is not the same thing as giving someone everything they want. Boundaries are…something they’re working on. She has a tendency towards sulking, maybe because she’s a dramatic pre-teen (she is), or maybe because every little instance of not getting something she wants reminds her of that place. Maybe both. Probably both.

  
Food is a big thing. She doesn’t really talk too much about her time at the lab but from the state of the veins on her arms and wrists Jim gets the feeling she was given nutrients intravenously most days, and whatever else was probably pretty basic, military style rations. Thanks to the Wheeler kid her first introduction to ‘normal’ food was a steady diet of eggos, hubba bubba, and funyuns, so she loves junk food and treats it as a bit of a security blanket. Needless to say, the salisbury steak tv dinner he sets down in front of her the first night they eat together gets a decidedly lukewarm reception. She pushes the plate away gently, an uninterested expression on her face. Jim lifts an eyebrow.

“What’s the matter kid, you don’t like steak?” She gives an endearingly blasé shrug, before proclaiming, simply, “eggos”.

Now - this is partly his fault since he’d been plying her with the damn things like bait for weeks, but there are some things that only work in the wilderness and eggos for breakfast, lunch and dinner are one of them.

He shakes his head. “You can’t eat nothing but eggos kid - come on, just try it,” he says, pushing the tray back to her. She looks down at the dinner, then up at him, then over to the freezer. From behind him, he hears the fridge door start to rattle.

“Unless you’re opening that door to get me another drink,” he starts, pointing to the can of beer sitting on the table between them, “it’s gonna stay shut until you’ve eaten some real food for dinner.” It’s a tenser moment than it ought to be as she stares him down, but he doesn’t give in and soon enough the fridge is quiet again. “That’s a cabin rule, okay Kid? No dessert until after dinner.” She’s ridiculously unimpressed and manages to huff her way through the meal without making a sound, her elbows on the table as she eats. _Table manners_ , he mentally adds to the list he’s keeping in his head. She finishes the steak and (most of) the peas, and he stops her with an “ah-ah” before she leaves the table. “Empty containers go in the garbage,” he tells her. The look she gives him makes it seem as though she’s contemplating cutting and running and might be funny if he was sure she’d stay.

“Cabin rule?” she asks quietly, her lips pursed around the words like she’d rather not say them. Jim nods back at her. “Cabin rule,” he echoes. She does as she’s told before going over to sit on the couch, leaving him at the table. When Jim finishes eating himself and brings her a toasted eggo, the look of pure happiness and surprise she gives him chokes him up a little bit.

“I said you could have one after dinner, didn’t I?” he gets out, the words scratchy in his throat. She nods her head up and down rapidly at him, a little “yes,” her only response, all dainty like, before tearing into the treat. He turns to go back to the kitchen when he hears her ask, “how many?”

“Hm?”

“How many are there?”

He turns back to face her, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “How many are there what?”

She swallows around a gigantic bite of Eggo before answering. “Cabin rules?”

Jim can’t stop the slow smile that stretches across his face, or the laugh that huffs out. “Hard to say, Kid,” he says, brushing Eggos crumbs off the couch back. “We’ll sort of figure them out as we go, I guess.” She’s satisfied with the answer he thinks, although she’s watching the television with an eerily focused expression on her face. A few minutes later she asks,

“More than ten?”

The laugh he belts out this time is a real one.

***************

One day she finds a small silver case on one of the bookshelves. Inside is a picture of him from his time in Vietnam on one side, and a gold and green medal with a crimson ribbon on the other side.

She brings it over in its folding case, and places it on the table. She taps it with her finger.

“You?”

He looks over. There’s still something of that boy’s face in his features now, hidden under a few more pounds and a few more decades of hurt and stress and life. He takes a pull of his beer. “Yeah,” he answers. “That’s me. In Vietnam, a long time ago.” He sees the look of piqued confusion on her face, the question she’s about to ask. “It’s a country a long way away from here, in Asia”. He makes a mental note to buy a globe or at least a book of world maps. Does she even know she’s in the United States? She’s still looking at him so he continues. “We were at war and I went to fight and they gave me that medal,” he finishes, nodding his head at it. He watches her looking at it, rubbing one thumb along the edges of the star.

“Why?” she asks, her thumb still tracing the outline, a contemplative look on her face.

“Why’d they give it to me?”

She nods.

Jim sighs, rubs his hand over his face. He didn’t expect to be having this conversation and war is something complicated enough for most adults to understand. “They gave it to me for - for being brave,” he says. “I did something brave and I saved the lives of a lot of guys in my unit. But it’s complicated, I had to hurt other people to do it. Kill other people. That’s why war is so terrible.”

She looks up at him. “Unit,” she sounds out. “Unit is…friends?”

“Yeah, like friends."

She’s quiet for another minute and he wonders if he’s royally cocked this up until she nods at him, slowly.

“Sometimes you have to kill” she says, in that quiet way she has, before picking the case back up and going back to the couch. All Jim can do is stare, mouth gone totally dry, as she simply settles back in on the cushions to change channels with her mind. She might not get tv humour or world geography but she’s lived life on a battlefield of her own, and probably understands this better than most people his own age. It’s almost comical how incongruous it is, this wide eyed girl talking about killing as she sits there watching soaps, the curls on her head bouncing a little every time she flicks the channel up.

**********

The fight he has with her about leaving the cabin to see Mike is probably the angriest he can remember being since Sara died. He’s absolutely _fuming_ at her recklessness, and he isn’t about to take shit from this kid who he’s doing everything in his power to keep safe while she decides to throw it all away for a hike to the middle school to act out Romeo and Juliet. He realizes too late that this isn’t going to be a normal argument. He doesn’t catch it, when he wrecks the tv - this is the moment it shifts for her, the moment it changes from a tantrum to a real, actual, knock out fight. He hasn’t seen the way it’s been building up for her, this sense of hopelessness, of being left behind, of being told one thing and always, always getting another. He doesn’t see that he’s handled this wrong, that while she absolutely should not have done what she did, he also needed a better plan than ‘tell her to wait and hope for the best’.

When she screams at him that he’s just like Papa he honestly can’t believe it, can’t even BELIEVE the ungratefulness of this child to compare him to the psycho torturing maniac who stole her entire childhood and put her in danger every single day. He doesn’t see that she’s coming to view this cabin as a prison, that even though he and Brenner are completely different, she resents the continued lack of agency, of control over her own life, exactly the same. When she throws the book at him he’s shocked, and when she slams the couch into his knee he almost whites out in anger. He doesn’t see that she doesn’t have enough resources, either emotionally or linguistically, to soften the switch from defence to offence. When she runs back to the bedroom and slams the door behind her, he’s there in a second, pounding on the wood and yelling at the top of his lungs until - until he hears her scream and scream and scream and the world explodes around him in a shower of wood and glass.

It’s not until later, when he realizes that he’s been gone way too long and she has no idea where he is and probably thinks he’s abandoned her, that he calls home on the radio. Sitting there in the car thinking about what happened in the clear light of day is sobering to say the least. Yeah, she needs boundaries, and yeah, she needs to understand that there are consequences to her actions, but the way he blew up at her…the way he (and this truly does make him choke back a sob in shame, head pressed to the steering wheel) _threatened to send her back to the lab_? If his own mother were still here she would have slapped him clean across the face. He tells himself - when he gets back to the Cabin, when he sees her again, he’ll explain. He’ll explain all of it. He’ll get his shit together and they’ll have a heart to heart and he’ll tell her, _show_ her, how much he cares about her and how much he lo-.

well.

how much he…yeah.

**********  
Jim can honestly say that out of a million possibilities, watching her walk through the Byers’ front door dressed like an extra from a psychobilly music video was not even on the list. He would have put money on Santa coming through the door before betting on her. He watches her emotional reunion with Mike, fights to keep his voice level as she turns to face him.

“The hell is this?” he asks, stepping up to her. “Where’ve you been?”

Her bratty “Where’ve _you_ been” back to him is the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard, and he clutches her to him roughly with his hand along her shoulders and his lips pressing a kiss to the top of her slicked back hair. Relief pulses through him like a drumbeat at having her in front of him, seeing for himself that she’s okay, that she’s _safe, she’s safe she's safe._

Jim’s never been that guy to talk about his feelings; not as a high school play boy, not in chicago as a big shot detective, and not after Sara died. Especially after Sara died. It was so much easier to swallow them down with the booze, and the pills, and the women, than to face the reality of being cracked open and left living. All of that hurt, all of that fear - he hadn’t dealt with it but at least he’d kept it (relatively) hidden under a layer of alcohol and barbituates. That is, of course, until he opened up his home and his heart to another little girl he isn't sure he can save.

She isn’t Sara. But sitting there in the car, driving into the heart of the evil that’s trying to kill them, he realizes- she doesn’t have to be Sara for her to be his girl. And he needs to stop letting the fear of losing her keep him from loving her the way she deserves to be loved.

He tries to explain and does a shit job - he brings up black holes as if she’s got any background knowledge to have that make sense - but somehow she gets it. She gets enough of it to reach out and grab his hand, her much smaller one cool in his own. He runs his thumb across her knuckles and feels her answering squeeze.

*********  
When it’s done, she collapses out of mid air into his arms with tears streaming down her cheeks and blood leaking out of her nose and her ears. He’s crying too, holding on to her so tightly his knuckles are white with it.

“You did good, Kid,” he whispers. “You did so good.”

They stay like that for a long time, just holding on to each other. It’s quiet in the shaft the way it is after a gunshot; the silence has a weight that settles around them and is broken only by his continued muted murmurs of praise and her sniffles. She’s almost passed out, and she probably doesn’t even hear what he’s saying to her but it doesn’t really matter. She’s alive and she’s whole and she’s his, and it’s enough.

For the first time in a long time - it’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! Stranger Things 2 has prompted me to dust off my fic writing hat after years of it being at the bottom of my closet. I absolutely cannot get enough of these two!! Title taken from the poem by Tyler Knott Gregson.


End file.
